


Nemesis

by Firelight_and_Rain



Series: Icewind Dale [1]
Category: The Legend of Drizzt Series - R. A. Salvatore
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Modern AU, Worldbuilding, small town AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 07:12:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8277274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Firelight_and_Rain/pseuds/Firelight_and_Rain
Summary: How did a viper like Entreri end up in a two-horse town, anyway?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is largely an exercise in brainstorming my Small Town AU continuity, and shore up some of the more glaring holes. (Of course, it spawned more questions and story leads than it resolved).

Drizzt had never been part of an academic integrity inquiry before.

(Only partly because he had been homeschooled until college).

He got by on wide-eyed innocence, he was told later. He’d guessed it during the time. It wasn’t very hard to do. Artemis Entreri was not well liked by anyone in the school.

Drizzt had a subconscious awareness of why Artemis was present at that time and place, that it was the same reason he was. He insisted to himself that he was doing well by himself now, he wouldn’t have ever needed a friend like that. It was a moot point. Drizzt had invested too much into what his degree represented. Independence.

*

He was disturbed by the car crash at the end of the school year. He really was. As pathetic as it was, he hadn’t had many friends at the institution. Maybe none. Maybe the tedious, hair-raising feud he’d had was the closest thing.

At least he didn’t have to worry about the scandal, which hadn’t really been Entreri’s fault, once he’d heard who was really behind it, someone with much more motive, following him.

Well. No, that wasn’t worth it. It hadn’t been a very big scandal.

*

He didn’t have to run the suspicious newcomer down in his Actually Not A Police Car. The suspicious newcomer had done him the favor of running themself into a ditch.

“Need help?”

The newcomer was petite for a human, hunched over, maybe in exasperation, facing their car. “No.” The voice used was deeper than middling, rough.

Drizzt approached and switched on his flashlight. The newcomer shyed away. “You’re not getting back on the road without a tow truck in this weather.”

“Fuck.”

Drizzt was starting to get annoyed. The stranger could help himself if he wasn’t going to accept his help.

“Get it in the truck, I’ll give you a ride back to town.”

“No. Thanks.”

“Look, I can’t just leave you out here by the side of the road. It’s not winter but you’re going to be seriously uncomfortable if you don’t find somewhere reasonable to sleep. I can drop you off at a hotel, if you like.” By ‘a hotel’, he meant ‘the only hotel in Icewind Dale’. Bruenor owned it. Because of that, it was a point of pride for the community, as far as Drizzt was concerned.

The stranger had moved to the back of his car and was pushing at it futilely. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll call the city -”

“The city? What city?”

“And tell them that something has come up, and stay here until you come to your senses.” Drizzt had gathered, partly by intuition and largely by evidence, that the stranger was more accustomed to the cities than to the wild white wilderness of the north. (Although, here and now, it was more the tedious muddy wilderness of the north).

The stranger crossed his arms and looked at him. Drizzt, for reasons that might have had to do with drow etiquette regarding shining bright lights at others and might have had to do with nothing at all, saw him by moonlight; there was something about him. Drizzt put it aside. He could see grey fog eyes, dark clothes, dark hair. Skin not white enough to glow corpse-pale in the sky’s elusive light.

“Fine,” the stranger said. “I need to get my phone.”

“We can do that,” Drizzt said, and then opened the back door of the car to be helpful and retrieve the strange man’s luggage for him.

He picked up a black duffel bag. His youth being what it was, he immediately set it back down and opened it. If there was a legal reason for this much cash in the middle of nowhere in a ditch off the road in a nondescript black duffel, he’d never heard of it.

He swung his flashlight right into the very consternated face of a probably quite alive Artemis Entreri.

Who then bolted for Drizzt’s truck.

Drizzt, rather stunned by the night’s events, just watched.

Entreri found that Drizzt had not, in fact, left the keys in the ignition. He appeared to be considering hotwiring the car.

Drizzt, in no hurry, found his pistol and approached his truck. He wasn’t sure where this was going, but at least he had a legal excuse to pull a gun on Artemis Entreri. That was a plus.

Seeing this, Artemis bolted off into the night.

Drizzt was amused. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that Icewind Dale was inhospitable.

*

The sun was just flirting with the horizon. Drizzt was sitting in the driver’s seat, bundled in his very warm jacket, eating a Cliff bar, when a bedraggled criminal - suspect, he hadn’t been charged with anything, yet - appeared to the left of the road. Entreri stopped, glared at him, and approached.

“Get in the truck,” Drizzt said cheerfully.

Entreri got in the truck and rested his forehead against the dashboard.

“Just, don’t tell me you told me so.”

*

Entreri’s trial was, predictably, somewhere else.

Less predictably, he came back.

Drizzt really hoped that had nothing to do with him. Maybe he was hiding from someone else - with the habits he adopted in Icewind Dale, somehow never settling even as small as the town was, and knowing Entreri, it made some sense. Drizzt just hoped it wouldn’t involve him, or anyone he knew by name, any further.


End file.
